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DVD Take the Money and Run (Full Screen Edition)
Woody Allen's feature-film debut, Take the Money and Run, a mockumentary that combines sight gags, sketchlike scenes, and standup jokes at rat-a-tat speed, looks positively primitive compared to his mature work. Primitive, but awfully funny. Allen plays Virgil Starkwell, a music-loving nebbish who turns to a life of crime at an early age and, undaunted by his utter and complete failure to pull off a single successful robbery, continues his unbroken spree of bungled heists and prison breaks even after he marries and raises a family. Narrator Jackson Beck, whose stentorian voice of authority makes a perfect foil for Starkwell's absurd exploits, lobs one droll quip after another with deadpan seriousness. Though spotty, Allen tosses so many jokes into the mix that it hardly matters and when they hit they are often hilarious: the chain gang posing as cousins to their old-woman hostage ("We're very close," Virgil explains to a dim cop), arguing with a dotty movie director who is supposed to be their cover for a bank robbery, Virgil's escape attempt with a bar of soap. Allen spoofs decades of crime films, everything from I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang to Bonnie and Clyde, but you don't have to know the movies to enjoy this goofy, sometimes clumsy, but quite clever comedy. --Sean Axmaker
Review(s): DVD Take the Money and Run (Full Screen Edition)
First triple threat from the Woodman. One of his funniest!
`Take the Money and Run' is the very first movie where Woody Allen is writer, director, and star, and true to the first film in any artist's series of work, it may be the his best up to `Annie Hall', his seventh film as writer/director/star and arguably his very best comedy. `Love and Death' and `Bananas' may a little weak. `Play It Again, Sam' has the first writing and direction where the audience develops some empathy with the characters, so it presages the more serious business of the later films. But `Take the Money and Run' is simply nonstop silliness, with some of the longest and best running gags this side of Mel Brooks.
Even this very first movie has many of Allen's trademarks. For a relatively low budget movie, the quality of the music is very, very good, with original pieces contributed by the up and coming Marvin Hamlisch. Even though the supporting cast is not filled with a lot of highly recognizable actors, most of the faces such as the chain gang supervisor all seem to have a vaguely familiar look about them. Allen's female lead is Janet Margolin, for whom this is probably the highlight of her career. His `Bananas' costar, Louise Lasser, later of `Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman' appears in a very small role.
Two other trademark motifs are the flashbacks to boyhood and the cut-aways to interviews with the principle character's parents. These devices appear in `Annie Hall' and even in the relatively serious `Crimes and Misdemeanors' plus several other films.
Another typical aspect of this movie is that it is a parody of documentaries, although not with such loving artfulness as Allen does in `Zelig'.
One thing that is entirely absent is any intellectuality. I can't recall any joke for which you need to read a Russian novel or see a classic silent movie to understand. While it strikes me that poor Virgil Starkwell does have some mock heroic aspects which may have been borrowed from `Don Quixote' or `Candide', I think that may be my seeing things of which Allen had no inkling.
Allen has claimed, contrary to a lot of other artists' statements, that comedy is easy. Allen is so adept in this movie at spinning off high quality jokes at such a rate that he genuinely makes it seem effortless. And yet, like the proverbial Chinese meal, you leave this movie and an hour later, you are `still hungry'. That is, you take away no warm feelings for any characters and their situations or any satisfaction that a hero succeeded in a quest or a heavy got their just deserts.
Some movies have compared Allen's work to the Marx brothers. In the sense that I suspect the Marx brothers have inoculated every American comedian since their heyday, I suppose there is something there. I suggest that W. C. Fields much more directly influences Allen. While the Marx brothers used a great deal of visual humor, Fields was a true poet of the illusion of clumsiness, created with his major skill as a juggler. Allen parodies some of Fields' great moves with a pool cue. While Allen can't hold a candle to Fields' dexterity, the result is still pretty funny.
My primary recommendation for people who may like some but not all of Allen's films, this one should definitely be in your collection, whether you just like his `early, funny' movies or prefer all his styles, but want to skip over some of the darker, less well written, or less interesting works.
"One of the early funny ones."
This is one of those movies that Woody has his fans refer to in "Stardust Memories", and vicariously in "Husbands and Wives", as being early funny work--and funny it is as you'll laugh your way through nearly all of it. Parts of "Take the Money and Run" are as hysterical as "Sleeper," such as the shot where his gun turns to soap suds and when he morphs into a Rabbi. Also of note is when he poses as a classical musician but can't place the name of Mozart. This is happy, loose camp in the spirit of the Marx Brothers. Rent it, buy it, do whatever, you can't go wrong with this one. It's good clean fun.
Hilarious first feature from Woody Allen
Allen's directorial debut is a joy from beginning to end. By no means does it have the depth and sophistication of his later work, but it's consistently funny, with one gag running into the next, and there are teasing moments of that blur between fantasy and reality that characterized his films.
The story concerns one Virgil Starkwell, a bespectacled failure who resorts to crime for a living, and can't even be a success at that. He tries to stage a bank robbery, but it flops when the tellers start arguing over whether his handwritten note says "I have a gub" or "I have a gun". It's told partly in a spoof-documentary style that foreshadows Allen's later full-blown mockumentary, Zelig (1983).
Related DVD's Take the Money and Run (Full Screen Edition)
Written for the stage and coherently opened up for the screen by veteran director Herbert Ross, Play It Again, Sam is closer to a conventional comedy than Woody Allen's more self-contained films, but his smart script and archetypal hero-nebbish achieve a special charm aimed squarely at movie buffs. Allen is Allan Felix, a film critic on the rebound after his wife's desertion trying to brave the choppy waters of born-again bachelorhood and struggling to reconcile his celluloid obsessions with the hazards of real-world dating. His apartment is a shrine to Humphrey Bogart, and it's none other than Bogey himself who materializes at strategic moments to counsel Allan on romantic strategy. He gets more corporeal aid from his married friends, Linda (Diane Keaton) and Dick (Tony Roberts),... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Woody Allen - Diane Keaton Director(s): Herbert Ross DVD Release Date: Released the 23 October 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Woody Allen's second film as a director was a wild, unpredictable, and unlikely comedy about a product-tester named Fielding Mellish (Allen), who can't quite connect with the woman of his dreams (Louise Lasser, Allen's ex-wife). He accidentally winds up in South America as a freedom fighter for a guerrilla leader who looks like Castro. Once he assumes power, the new dictator quickly goes insane--which leaves Fielding in charge to negotiate with the U.S. The film is chockfull of wonderfully bizarre gags, such as the dreams Fielding recounts to his shrink about dueling crucified messiahs, vying for a parking place near Wall Street. Look for an unknown Sylvester Stallone in a tiny role--but watch this film for Allen's surprisingly physical (and always verbally dexterous) humor. --Marshall... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Woody Allen - Louise Lasser Director(s): Woody Allen DVD Release Date: Released the 05 July 2000 Usually ships in 24 hours
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If Interiors was Woody Allen's Bergman movie, and Stardust Memories was his Fellini movie, then you could say that Sleeper is his Buster Keaton movie. Relying more on visual/conceptual/slapstick gags than his trademark verbal wit, Sleeper is probably the funniest of what would become known as Allen's "early, funny films" and a milestone in his development as a director. Allen plays Miles Monroe, cryogenically frozen in 1973 (he went into the hospital for an ulcer operation) and unthawed 200 years later. Society has become a sterile, Big Brother-controlled dystopia, and Miles joins the underground resistance--joined by a pampered rich woman (Diane Keaton at her bubbliest). Among the most famous gags are Miles's attempt to impersonate a domestic-servant... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Woody Allen - Diane Keaton Director(s): Woody Allen DVD Release Date: Released the 05 July 2000 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Writer-director Woody Allen's 1975 comedy finds the familiar Allen persona transposed to 19th-century Russia, as a cowardly serf drafted into the war against Napoleon, when all he'd rather do is write poetry and obsess over his beautiful but pretentious cousin (Diane Keaton). A total disaster as a soldier, Allen's cowardice serves him well when he hides in a cannon and is shot into a tent of French soldiers, suddenly making him a national hero. After his cousin agrees to marry him, thinking he'll be killed in a duel he miraculously survives, the couple must hatch a ludicrous plot to assassinate Napoleon in order to keep the coward Allen out of yet another war. Allen and Keaton show what a perfect comic team they make in this film, even predating their most celebrated pairing in Annie... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Woody Allen - Diane Keaton Director(s): Woody Allen DVD Release Date: Released the 05 July 2000 Usually ships in 24 hours
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A collection of vignettes, loosely based on the book by Dr. David Rueben, written and directed by Woody Allen, Everything contains some very funny moments. It's easy to forget that the cerebral Allen excelled at the type of broad, Catskill, dirty jokes and visual gags that run amok here. It's also remarkable how dirty this 1972 movie really was--bestiality, exposure, perversion, and S&M get their moments to shine. The Woody Allen here, who appears in many of the sketches, is a portent of the seedy old Allen of Deconstructing Harry. Although the final bit, which takes place inside a man's body during a very hot date, is hilarious, most of Everything feels like the screen adaptation of a '70s bathroom joke book. Still, a must for Allen fans. --Keith SimantonMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Woody Allen - Louise Lasser - Gene Wilder Director(s): Woody Allen DVD Release Date: Released the 05 July 2000 Usually ships in 24 hours
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